Android 4.0.3 APIs

In this document

Reference

Android 4.0.3 (ICE_CREAM_SANDWICH_MR1)
is an incremental release of the Android 4.x
(Ice Cream Sandwich) platform family. This release includes new features for
users and developers, API changes, and various bug fixes.

For developers, the Android 4.0.3 platform is available as a
downloadable component for the Android SDK. The downloadable platform includes
an Android library and system image, as well as a set of emulator skins and
more. To get started developing or testing against Android 4.0.3,
use the Android SDK Manager to download the platform into your SDK.

API Overview

The sections below provide a technical overview of new APIs in Android 4.0.3.

Social stream API in Contacts Provider

Applications that use social stream data such as status updates and check-ins
can now sync that data with each of the user’s contacts, providing items in a
stream along with photos for each.

The database table that contains an individual contact’s social stream is
defined by ContactsContract.StreamItems, the Uri for
which is nested within the ContactsContract.RawContacts
directory to which the stream items belong. Each social stream table includes
several columns for metadata about each stream item, such as an icon
representing the source (an avatar), a label for the item, the primary text
content, comments about the item (such as responses from other people), and
more. Photos associated with a stream are stored in another table, defined by
ContactsContract.StreamItemPhotos, which is available
as a sub-directory of the ContactsContract.StreamItems
Uri.

To read or write social stream items for a contact, an application must
request permission from the user by declaring <uses-permission
android:name="android.permission.READ_SOCIAL_STREAM"> and/or <uses-permission
android:name="android.permission.WRITE_SOCIAL_STREAM"> in their manifest files.

Calendar Provider

Adds the class CalendarContract.Colors to represent
a color table in the Calendar
Provider. The class provides fields for accessing
colors available for a given account. Colors are referenced by
COLOR_KEY
which must be unique for a given account name/type. These values can only be
updated by the sync adapter.

Home screen widgets

Starting from Android 4.0, home screen widgets should no longer include their
own padding. Instead, the system now automatically adds padding for each widget,
based the characteristics of the current screen. This leads to a more uniform,
consistent presentation of widgets in a grid. To assist applications that host
home screen widgets, the platform provides a new method
getDefaultPaddingForWidget(). Applications can call this method to get the
system-defined padding and account for it when computing the number of cells to
allocate to the widget.

Spell-checking

For apps that accessing spell-checker services, a new cancel() method cancels
any pending and running spell-checker tasks in a session.

For spell-checker services, a new suggestions flag,
RESULT_ATTR_HAS_RECOMMENDED_SUGGESTIONS,
lets the services distinguish higher-confidence suggestions from
lower-confidence ones. For example, a spell-checker could set the flag if an
input word is not in the user dictionary but has likely suggestions, or not set
the flag if an input word is not in the dictionary and has suggestions that are
likely to be less useful.

A new FLAG_AUTO_CORRECTION style
for text spans indicates that auto correction is about to be applied to a
word/text that the user is typing/composing. This type of suggestion is rendered
differently, to indicate the auto correction is happening.

Bluetooth

New public methods fetchUuidsWithSdp() and getUuids() let apps determine the features
(UUIDs) supported by a remote device. In the case of fetchUuidsWithSdp(), the system performs a
service discovery on the remote device to get the UUIDs supported, then
broadcasts the result in an ACTION_UUID intent.

UI toolkit

New methods setUserVisibleHint() and
getUserVisibleHint() allow a
fragment to set a hint of whether or not it is currently user-visible. The
system defers the start of fragments that are not user-visible until the loaders
for visible fragments have run. The visibility hint is "true" by default.

When touch-exploration mode is enabled, a new secure setting
ACCESSIBILITY_SPEAK_PASSWORD
indicates whether the user requests the IME to speak text entered in password fields, even when
a headset is not in use. By default, no password text is spoken unless a headset
is in use.

Text-to-speech

Adds a new listener class, UtteranceProgressListener, that engines can register to
receive notification of speech-synthesis errors.

Database

A new CrossProcessCursorWrapper class lets content
providers return results for a cross-process query more efficiently. The new
class is a useful building block for wrapping cursors that will be sent to
processes remotely. It can also transform normal Cursor
objects into CrossProcessCursor objects
transparently.

The CrossProcessCursorWrapper class fixes common
performance issues and bugs that applications have encountered when
implementing content providers.

API Level

The Android 4.0.3 API is assigned an integer
identifier—15—that is stored in the system itself.
This identifier, called the "API level", allows the system to correctly determine whether an
application is compatible with the system, prior to installing the application.

To use APIs introduced in Android 4.0.3 in your application, you need compile the
application against an Android platform that supports API level 15 or
higher. Depending on your needs, you might also need to add an
android:minSdkVersion="15" attribute to the
<uses-sdk>
element.